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Henk Peeters: “The death blow came when everything looked so beautiful at the second Nul exhibition. Universal acceptance. For me, the fun was over then.”
Jan Schoonhoven: “I like acceptance, so I continued. I’m a real art maker, the work goes on. Of course it does change, it also experiences various influences. I am now Baselitz-ing (Baselitz: German neo-expressionist painter, ed.), but they are still Zero-esque things.” Peeters: “In retrospect, we were mistaken, Jan is simply an artist. I was mainly interested in making things that provoke a shock reaction. But when that no longer happened and we achieved success, I actually became less involved with the group. Mack and Piene were arguing, but they were also very ambitious people. We didn’t do that, we were far too gentlemanly. Manzoni and Klein chose the smartest way, they died. Fontana took the decorative direction. Castellani went into politics. Subsequently I got involved with the Groupe du recherche d’art visuel in Paris. They were dreadful formalists, so measly, those kinetic mechanisms, the flashing lights. I helped organize the Licht-Kunst-Licht exhibition in Eindhoven. But I was actually no longer interested in beautiful art. They have to be shocked. I’m a pacifist, so I can’t throw bombs. I have to express my irritation. I would like to have done what Staeck did with those political posters, but those things just never occurred to me. And I’m not going to just sit and draw if I don’t feel like it.” |
How did the Nul group begin?
Schoonhoven: “Henk actually formed the group. First there was the Netherlands Informal Group, which worked in an impersonal, abstract style. Intrinsically abstract, not that rotten Ecole de Paris, not Cobra. Art had to be pure and not a picture. We borrowed from Tapies, the matter painters and Dubuffet.”
Peeters: “In The Hague there was that exhibition of American art with Pollock and Tobey in ’56. That was very inspiring. For the informals, you could say that it was one family of Delft and Hague artists. For my generation, Jan was one of the moderns and one of the few abstracts, who sought no affiliation with the Bauhaus or De Stijl. He worked in the style of Klee to some extent. By The Hague standards, he was very extreme. In my student days at the academy in The Hague, I made constructivist, Malevich-style work.”
Art criminel
Schoonhoven: “My father wanted me to be a drawing teacher, but I didn’t want that. I followed the course from ’30 to ’34. Then I quit. It was a period of crisis. My father was an accountant, so it was not too bad for us, we could still afford food, drink and a coat. I only started working in a library in 1942, later I joined the PTT (Dutch Postal Service). But I have always been painting and drawing, ever since I was sixteen.”
Peeters: “Jan and I met in 1946 when we organized that exhibition about Dutch art in the Soviet Union. The Cold War put an end to those plans. It began in Dordrecht in Galerie Punt 31. Those guys were making tachist paintings. There were exhibitions of Bram Bogart, which were very inspiring. We also had solo exhibitions there; finally we made group exhibitions with Jan Henderikse, who frequently visited Jan and his wife in Delft, Kees van Bohemen and Bram Bogart, who dropped out later, and of course Armando. We read in the newspaper that Armando was working on art criminel. We thought we have to get this guy. The Informele Groep had nothing to do with the official art world. The only one who accepted us was Sandberg, but he accepted anything new that turned up.”
Schoonhoven: “When we began as informals, we thought that we were just an exhibition group. We had no idea that it would ruffle so many feathers.”
Peeters: “Those exhibitions nearly cost me my job. Sandberg had to intercede at the management of the Academy in Arnhem, where I was teaching. That kind of art incited aggression. Sandberg had so much trouble with that. While we used absolutely no aggression.”
749/3
Schoonhoven: “They thought we were a bunch of filthy paint smearers. But due to that resistance, something structural did emerge.”
Peeters: “You have to bear in mind how the museums were here. Only Sandberg went abroad sometimes. That’s where we were successful.”
Schoonhoven: “De Wilde heard from Appolonio, director of the Venice Biennale, that some guys in the Netherlands were making such nice work. ‘Yes, oh yes, I know that,’ he said.”
Peeters: “You can’t imagine the ignorance of the art world, the museums, the press were the same. Prange in Het Parool and Redeker in the Handelsblad. It was deadly boring. The effect was felt quicker by the artists than by the museums. The literati did understand it almost immediately. K. Schippers, Bernlef too, the Barbaren (Barbarians) group. The Haagse Post was the place where most people met each other. Hiltermann’s girlfriend, Silvia Brandts Buys was a smart woman, she wrote all about Hiltermann and handed out the bed sheets. She brought Vinkenoog, Jan Vrijman and Sleutelaar into the editorial team. You have to take a look at what the Haagse Post did, it spawned the whole VPRO. The realism of the Haagse Post was something new at that time, straight to the point, raw, American.”
Schoonhoven: “You had to report what was happening, without bullshit. For us, the Haagse Post was the connection with literature and with Armando, who said: ‘Guys, I’ve made something now, it’s not art, but it is so beautiful’. Armando, in my opinion at least, was a kind of hunting dog, who was chasing Henk.”
Peeters: “Armando has something compelling. We received a little money from the Prins Bernhardfonds, with which we made a catalogue for the Dutch Informals in ’59. Armando wrote the introduction, while I wrote a German story.”
Peeters goes to the bookcase, takes a thin booklet and reads Armando’s text with a deadpan face and monotone voice. “Fanaticism is required, most of the paint is in the clammy hands of childish boys with soft white legs and chests. Oh, if only their mother was still alive!” It ended with the words: “The new generation is too unbusinesslike in its dealings, they even laugh a lot, what a waste of time.”
Schoonhoven: “It actually lasted only two years, the informal time.”
Peeters: “There was a kind of momentum. We brought canvases to the exhibition still soaking wet. We developed extremely fast. The color soon disappeared. That red, yellow and blue – that was Cobra. We also worked increasingly flat.”
What influences were there at that time?
Peeters: “For me, seeing Yves Klein in Paris was a revelation. Also the exhibition Monochrome Malerei in Leverkusen in 1960.”
Schoonhoven: “Jan Henderikse had the catalogue of that. There was work by Holweck, who worked with paper, Mack, Piene, Uecker, Fontana and Klein.”
Peeters: “Then Jan Henderikse went to Germany and began working in a new-realistic style.”
Schoonhoven: “Afterwards came the separation of table and bed: New-realists and Zero.”
Peeters: “The ring closed very slightly. Yves Klein was a brother in law of Uecker. All those kindred spirits in Europe knew each other in no time. Kasper of Galerie Kasper in Lausanne had that magazine Art Actuel, he wanted to be the spokesman for these people.”
Schoonhoven: “He landed a ton of work.”
Peeters: “He also had a very rich wife. Here, you had to toil to be able to show your work. We tried to do something for our foreign colleagues over here, then they did something for us abroad. Because we had no galleries here, we asked Sandberg for that Zero exhibition. That was 1961.”
Schoonhoven: “But it did have to be on a shoestring.”
Peeters: “It cost us a lot of money, I even received the bill for the poster.”
How did people react to the Nul-Zero exhibition?
Peeters: “Well, fortunately it caused a riot. That exhibition lasted two weeks and it had sixty thousand visitors. That was mainly due to the riots in the newspaper and on TV.”
The critics of De Telegraaf and the Algemeen Handelsblad in particular, were extremely derogatory in their reactions. Ed Wingen wrote in De Telegraaf: “A long line of curious youngsters, including many artists, which are immediately recognizable by their leather jackets, drainpipe pants and hair that grows all over the face, squeezed themselves through the entrance into the shrine of the Zeroists.” In the Algemeen Handelsblad Hans Redeker lashed out at the so-called Nullists: “With minor exceptions, they managed no more than a manifestation of depression and boredom, of listless dissatisfaction with themselves and the world, a mindset for social psychologists to occupy themselves with, but which in no way justifies this exhibition and all the uproar.”
Peeters: “A lot of photographers attended, because the work is very photogenic: car tires, refrigerators, beer crates. I had a refrigerator there myself. The fact that the exhibition was sponsored by companies; they were also furious about that. Vita Diepvries and Goodyear were named in the catalogue. The critics were very upset with Sandberg for that, because such a thing was just not artistic. We made it even worse than it was, because we knew it touched on a raw nerve. Henderikse wanted to use Heineken, but he had to take Amstel due to the contract of the restaurant. He was irritated by that, he told Sandberg, as it restricted him in his artistic freedom.”
Did you sell anything?
Peeters: “No, we never sold anything here. The first person who sold something here was Fontana, but he belonged to the elders. He helped us a lot and gave us work to sell. We used that money to organize an exhibition here.”
Did you buy work from each other?
Peeters: “Certainly not, we had no money for that. We swapped. There were days when we had nothing to eat. Because I was responsible for the organization, I always had to pay the bills immediately. When we still didn’t sell anything at the second exhibition, I gave up. I thought: it has to come now, but it never did. Jan was the only one who sold some work.”
Schoonhoven: “We certainly didn’t want support. Henk, Armando and I had jobs. Jan Henderikse worked at a box factory. Compensation, we didn’t want all that crap. From ’56 on, I increasingly began selling a bit more. I sold drawings in oils for a hundred guilders. I only started taking off after the Documenta in Kassel and the Biennale in Sao Paolo in ’67. I once sold a relief for seventy-five thousand guilders, because my wife had seen a beautiful pair of shoes. But after Kassel, the Germans began buying and then the reliefs were selling in their thousands. Leo Verboon of Orez-Mobiel, to whom I came under contract in ’65, determines the prices. I have to give up fifty percent of that. But all the effort, all the pain is his. He does it extremely well.”
Peeters: “A lot went missing at that time. I lost forty works, no less. Those Italians were the worst, you never got anything back from them.”
Schoonhoven: “Ach, that’s how it goes. You also sometimes hear that a wonderful collection of work by Kandinsky or Malevitch suddenly surfaces. How do you suppose that happens?”
Why did you actually use refrigerators, car tires or beer bottles?
Peeters: “We wanted out of that oppressive art world. Pop music is for everyone. Art should also be for everyone. Those exhibition openings, have you been to them sometimes? Horrible! That opening of ours with the hot air balloons out on the street in Arnhem was wonderful. All types came to see, grandmothers, kids. So much better than viewing art together. You use materials that are also great outside the museum. Paint is art. Now you take cotton wool, powder puffs, refrigerators. You show that they’re beautiful too. The idea is that beautiful things can also be seen at the Hema. That art also exists outside the museum.”
Did you, as the Nul Group, have an ideology?
Schoonhoven: “We had expressly no message. We took reality as it was, not that wooly idealism to want to change the world through art. That’s nonsense.”
We didn’t want to make people socialists, we just wanted to let them observe. We wanted an art that everyone could understand. No hierarchy, we chose arrangement, very objective. Art as a product.”
What did you regard as quality?
Peeters: “The quality cannot be determined beforehand, you recognize it afterwards. There were never ten bad Mondrians made before Mondrian. Often you choose flawlessly. You suddenly saw Yves Klein or Manzoni in a gallery. We never missed anyone, because you react very intuitively. We were actually all exempt from the art scene, we were amateurs: Manzoni was an earl and had his own money, Yves Klein was a sports teacher, Castellani was an architect, Piene and Mack had studied literature and philosophy. Only Fontana, also an earl, made a living from his art, but he was also famous.”
Schoonhoven: “We didn’t live from our paintbrush. During the day, I worked at the post office as a civil servant. In the evenings I could enjoy making some art. At a certain point at the post office, they said to me: ‘wouldn’t you be more at home in the aesthetic department?’ I said, not me, are you crazy. Forget art, just the lower, well in the end I was fairly high-up in the legal department. When you draw up a document you do have to keep your attention focused. For Henk it was different. At an academy they drain you aesthetically, being an artist all day and then in the evening too, no, then you’re better off watching TV.”
You had a good sense of publicity.
Peeters: “You didn’t need to do much for that. We had journalists among our circles: Armando, Sleutelaar. Henk Hofland wanted to interview us once. To impress him we hired a suite at the Amstel Hotel and were constantly talking about refrigerators and such. Vaandrager, Sleutelaar, Hans Verhagen, Cherry Duyns, Armando and I were there. He was never able to use the interview. We printed it later in Raster, we were talking about the ordinary things in life, and he thought that we were actually against such things. Betty van Garrel always said that we looked like car dealers, normal suit, white shirt, tie. We wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible.
Literature also had to be ‘inconspicuous’ and ordinary. The Gard-Sivikkers wrote a kind of poésie trouvéé, like Vaandrager in Made in Madurodam:
‘The croquettes in the restaurant are on the small side.’
Armando also used fragments of conversations, like in his poem September in de trein (September in the train)
’20.9.63
- oh there’s no smoking here
- no smoking? Yes, no smoking
- yes, it’s just not allowed, eh
- otherwise, there’s plenty of room elsewhere
- well, I’m sitting now
- that’s true
- when I sit, then I sit.”
Peeters: “We also had a lot of opportunities on TV. On the Vara channel, first with Henk de Bie, later with Ellen Blazer.”
Schoonhoven: “Those TV broadcasts were popular, but they didn’t understand a thing.”
Peeters: “Willem de Ridder’s right you know, TV gives you cancer from the beam.”
What do you think about that time now, in retrospect?
Peeters: “If you look back now, very little happened.”
Schoonhoven: “Now, now, a lot has happened of course. The CPN has grown, the youth has become much more businesslike, standing much firmer on their feet.”
Peeters: “But in retrospect, it is disappointing.”
Schoonhoven: “Henk, you should have known that as a communist. It just goes slowly, you know that.”
Peeters: “I did think that we had a very optimistic belief. Embarrassing.”
Schoonhoven: “Oh Henk, it wasn’t really all that bad now. It wasn’t all for nothing. Nineteen fifties or now, the atmosphere is different, after all. Including in the student world.
This is an old geezer comment but if a boy of twenty makes something nice today, he’s not allowed to make anything else, then he’s tied to his gallery, subsidies and commissions. We had a lot more freedom, you could easily start a different genre, because you weren’t selling anyway.”
Interview by Ella Reitsma and Gijs van Tuyl in Vrij Nederland, 24 November 1979, at the occasion of the international ZERO exhibition in the Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerp
Schoonhoven: “Henk actually formed the group. First there was the Netherlands Informal Group, which worked in an impersonal, abstract style. Intrinsically abstract, not that rotten Ecole de Paris, not Cobra. Art had to be pure and not a picture. We borrowed from Tapies, the matter painters and Dubuffet.”
Peeters: “In The Hague there was that exhibition of American art with Pollock and Tobey in ’56. That was very inspiring. For the informals, you could say that it was one family of Delft and Hague artists. For my generation, Jan was one of the moderns and one of the few abstracts, who sought no affiliation with the Bauhaus or De Stijl. He worked in the style of Klee to some extent. By The Hague standards, he was very extreme. In my student days at the academy in The Hague, I made constructivist, Malevich-style work.”
Art criminel
Schoonhoven: “My father wanted me to be a drawing teacher, but I didn’t want that. I followed the course from ’30 to ’34. Then I quit. It was a period of crisis. My father was an accountant, so it was not too bad for us, we could still afford food, drink and a coat. I only started working in a library in 1942, later I joined the PTT (Dutch Postal Service). But I have always been painting and drawing, ever since I was sixteen.”
Peeters: “Jan and I met in 1946 when we organized that exhibition about Dutch art in the Soviet Union. The Cold War put an end to those plans. It began in Dordrecht in Galerie Punt 31. Those guys were making tachist paintings. There were exhibitions of Bram Bogart, which were very inspiring. We also had solo exhibitions there; finally we made group exhibitions with Jan Henderikse, who frequently visited Jan and his wife in Delft, Kees van Bohemen and Bram Bogart, who dropped out later, and of course Armando. We read in the newspaper that Armando was working on art criminel. We thought we have to get this guy. The Informele Groep had nothing to do with the official art world. The only one who accepted us was Sandberg, but he accepted anything new that turned up.”
Schoonhoven: “When we began as informals, we thought that we were just an exhibition group. We had no idea that it would ruffle so many feathers.”
Peeters: “Those exhibitions nearly cost me my job. Sandberg had to intercede at the management of the Academy in Arnhem, where I was teaching. That kind of art incited aggression. Sandberg had so much trouble with that. While we used absolutely no aggression.”
749/3
Schoonhoven: “They thought we were a bunch of filthy paint smearers. But due to that resistance, something structural did emerge.”
Peeters: “You have to bear in mind how the museums were here. Only Sandberg went abroad sometimes. That’s where we were successful.”
Schoonhoven: “De Wilde heard from Appolonio, director of the Venice Biennale, that some guys in the Netherlands were making such nice work. ‘Yes, oh yes, I know that,’ he said.”
Peeters: “You can’t imagine the ignorance of the art world, the museums, the press were the same. Prange in Het Parool and Redeker in the Handelsblad. It was deadly boring. The effect was felt quicker by the artists than by the museums. The literati did understand it almost immediately. K. Schippers, Bernlef too, the Barbaren (Barbarians) group. The Haagse Post was the place where most people met each other. Hiltermann’s girlfriend, Silvia Brandts Buys was a smart woman, she wrote all about Hiltermann and handed out the bed sheets. She brought Vinkenoog, Jan Vrijman and Sleutelaar into the editorial team. You have to take a look at what the Haagse Post did, it spawned the whole VPRO. The realism of the Haagse Post was something new at that time, straight to the point, raw, American.”
Schoonhoven: “You had to report what was happening, without bullshit. For us, the Haagse Post was the connection with literature and with Armando, who said: ‘Guys, I’ve made something now, it’s not art, but it is so beautiful’. Armando, in my opinion at least, was a kind of hunting dog, who was chasing Henk.”
Peeters: “Armando has something compelling. We received a little money from the Prins Bernhardfonds, with which we made a catalogue for the Dutch Informals in ’59. Armando wrote the introduction, while I wrote a German story.”
Peeters goes to the bookcase, takes a thin booklet and reads Armando’s text with a deadpan face and monotone voice. “Fanaticism is required, most of the paint is in the clammy hands of childish boys with soft white legs and chests. Oh, if only their mother was still alive!” It ended with the words: “The new generation is too unbusinesslike in its dealings, they even laugh a lot, what a waste of time.”
Schoonhoven: “It actually lasted only two years, the informal time.”
Peeters: “There was a kind of momentum. We brought canvases to the exhibition still soaking wet. We developed extremely fast. The color soon disappeared. That red, yellow and blue – that was Cobra. We also worked increasingly flat.”
What influences were there at that time?
Peeters: “For me, seeing Yves Klein in Paris was a revelation. Also the exhibition Monochrome Malerei in Leverkusen in 1960.”
Schoonhoven: “Jan Henderikse had the catalogue of that. There was work by Holweck, who worked with paper, Mack, Piene, Uecker, Fontana and Klein.”
Peeters: “Then Jan Henderikse went to Germany and began working in a new-realistic style.”
Schoonhoven: “Afterwards came the separation of table and bed: New-realists and Zero.”
Peeters: “The ring closed very slightly. Yves Klein was a brother in law of Uecker. All those kindred spirits in Europe knew each other in no time. Kasper of Galerie Kasper in Lausanne had that magazine Art Actuel, he wanted to be the spokesman for these people.”
Schoonhoven: “He landed a ton of work.”
Peeters: “He also had a very rich wife. Here, you had to toil to be able to show your work. We tried to do something for our foreign colleagues over here, then they did something for us abroad. Because we had no galleries here, we asked Sandberg for that Zero exhibition. That was 1961.”
Schoonhoven: “But it did have to be on a shoestring.”
Peeters: “It cost us a lot of money, I even received the bill for the poster.”
How did people react to the Nul-Zero exhibition?
Peeters: “Well, fortunately it caused a riot. That exhibition lasted two weeks and it had sixty thousand visitors. That was mainly due to the riots in the newspaper and on TV.”
The critics of De Telegraaf and the Algemeen Handelsblad in particular, were extremely derogatory in their reactions. Ed Wingen wrote in De Telegraaf: “A long line of curious youngsters, including many artists, which are immediately recognizable by their leather jackets, drainpipe pants and hair that grows all over the face, squeezed themselves through the entrance into the shrine of the Zeroists.” In the Algemeen Handelsblad Hans Redeker lashed out at the so-called Nullists: “With minor exceptions, they managed no more than a manifestation of depression and boredom, of listless dissatisfaction with themselves and the world, a mindset for social psychologists to occupy themselves with, but which in no way justifies this exhibition and all the uproar.”
Peeters: “A lot of photographers attended, because the work is very photogenic: car tires, refrigerators, beer crates. I had a refrigerator there myself. The fact that the exhibition was sponsored by companies; they were also furious about that. Vita Diepvries and Goodyear were named in the catalogue. The critics were very upset with Sandberg for that, because such a thing was just not artistic. We made it even worse than it was, because we knew it touched on a raw nerve. Henderikse wanted to use Heineken, but he had to take Amstel due to the contract of the restaurant. He was irritated by that, he told Sandberg, as it restricted him in his artistic freedom.”
Did you sell anything?
Peeters: “No, we never sold anything here. The first person who sold something here was Fontana, but he belonged to the elders. He helped us a lot and gave us work to sell. We used that money to organize an exhibition here.”
Did you buy work from each other?
Peeters: “Certainly not, we had no money for that. We swapped. There were days when we had nothing to eat. Because I was responsible for the organization, I always had to pay the bills immediately. When we still didn’t sell anything at the second exhibition, I gave up. I thought: it has to come now, but it never did. Jan was the only one who sold some work.”
Schoonhoven: “We certainly didn’t want support. Henk, Armando and I had jobs. Jan Henderikse worked at a box factory. Compensation, we didn’t want all that crap. From ’56 on, I increasingly began selling a bit more. I sold drawings in oils for a hundred guilders. I only started taking off after the Documenta in Kassel and the Biennale in Sao Paolo in ’67. I once sold a relief for seventy-five thousand guilders, because my wife had seen a beautiful pair of shoes. But after Kassel, the Germans began buying and then the reliefs were selling in their thousands. Leo Verboon of Orez-Mobiel, to whom I came under contract in ’65, determines the prices. I have to give up fifty percent of that. But all the effort, all the pain is his. He does it extremely well.”
Peeters: “A lot went missing at that time. I lost forty works, no less. Those Italians were the worst, you never got anything back from them.”
Schoonhoven: “Ach, that’s how it goes. You also sometimes hear that a wonderful collection of work by Kandinsky or Malevitch suddenly surfaces. How do you suppose that happens?”
Why did you actually use refrigerators, car tires or beer bottles?
Peeters: “We wanted out of that oppressive art world. Pop music is for everyone. Art should also be for everyone. Those exhibition openings, have you been to them sometimes? Horrible! That opening of ours with the hot air balloons out on the street in Arnhem was wonderful. All types came to see, grandmothers, kids. So much better than viewing art together. You use materials that are also great outside the museum. Paint is art. Now you take cotton wool, powder puffs, refrigerators. You show that they’re beautiful too. The idea is that beautiful things can also be seen at the Hema. That art also exists outside the museum.”
Did you, as the Nul Group, have an ideology?
Schoonhoven: “We had expressly no message. We took reality as it was, not that wooly idealism to want to change the world through art. That’s nonsense.”
We didn’t want to make people socialists, we just wanted to let them observe. We wanted an art that everyone could understand. No hierarchy, we chose arrangement, very objective. Art as a product.”
What did you regard as quality?
Peeters: “The quality cannot be determined beforehand, you recognize it afterwards. There were never ten bad Mondrians made before Mondrian. Often you choose flawlessly. You suddenly saw Yves Klein or Manzoni in a gallery. We never missed anyone, because you react very intuitively. We were actually all exempt from the art scene, we were amateurs: Manzoni was an earl and had his own money, Yves Klein was a sports teacher, Castellani was an architect, Piene and Mack had studied literature and philosophy. Only Fontana, also an earl, made a living from his art, but he was also famous.”
Schoonhoven: “We didn’t live from our paintbrush. During the day, I worked at the post office as a civil servant. In the evenings I could enjoy making some art. At a certain point at the post office, they said to me: ‘wouldn’t you be more at home in the aesthetic department?’ I said, not me, are you crazy. Forget art, just the lower, well in the end I was fairly high-up in the legal department. When you draw up a document you do have to keep your attention focused. For Henk it was different. At an academy they drain you aesthetically, being an artist all day and then in the evening too, no, then you’re better off watching TV.”
You had a good sense of publicity.
Peeters: “You didn’t need to do much for that. We had journalists among our circles: Armando, Sleutelaar. Henk Hofland wanted to interview us once. To impress him we hired a suite at the Amstel Hotel and were constantly talking about refrigerators and such. Vaandrager, Sleutelaar, Hans Verhagen, Cherry Duyns, Armando and I were there. He was never able to use the interview. We printed it later in Raster, we were talking about the ordinary things in life, and he thought that we were actually against such things. Betty van Garrel always said that we looked like car dealers, normal suit, white shirt, tie. We wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible.
Literature also had to be ‘inconspicuous’ and ordinary. The Gard-Sivikkers wrote a kind of poésie trouvéé, like Vaandrager in Made in Madurodam:
‘The croquettes in the restaurant are on the small side.’
Armando also used fragments of conversations, like in his poem September in de trein (September in the train)
’20.9.63
- oh there’s no smoking here
- no smoking? Yes, no smoking
- yes, it’s just not allowed, eh
- otherwise, there’s plenty of room elsewhere
- well, I’m sitting now
- that’s true
- when I sit, then I sit.”
Peeters: “We also had a lot of opportunities on TV. On the Vara channel, first with Henk de Bie, later with Ellen Blazer.”
Schoonhoven: “Those TV broadcasts were popular, but they didn’t understand a thing.”
Peeters: “Willem de Ridder’s right you know, TV gives you cancer from the beam.”
What do you think about that time now, in retrospect?
Peeters: “If you look back now, very little happened.”
Schoonhoven: “Now, now, a lot has happened of course. The CPN has grown, the youth has become much more businesslike, standing much firmer on their feet.”
Peeters: “But in retrospect, it is disappointing.”
Schoonhoven: “Henk, you should have known that as a communist. It just goes slowly, you know that.”
Peeters: “I did think that we had a very optimistic belief. Embarrassing.”
Schoonhoven: “Oh Henk, it wasn’t really all that bad now. It wasn’t all for nothing. Nineteen fifties or now, the atmosphere is different, after all. Including in the student world.
This is an old geezer comment but if a boy of twenty makes something nice today, he’s not allowed to make anything else, then he’s tied to his gallery, subsidies and commissions. We had a lot more freedom, you could easily start a different genre, because you weren’t selling anyway.”
Interview by Ella Reitsma and Gijs van Tuyl in Vrij Nederland, 24 November 1979, at the occasion of the international ZERO exhibition in the Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerp
